VISA

A stamp in your passport that allows you entry into a certain country. Usually a seal of that nation with some bureaucratic blabber added for good looks. Since passports are usually 20 to 30 pages long, you run out of space for visas fairly quickly, especially if you travel a lot.

The need for a visa, which takes anything from 2 hours to a month to obtain, depends on what country you're flying to. Citizens never need visas for their own countries. Some countries, such as Australia, Canada and Japan, are fairly lax and don't require visas for visitors from friendly countries, such as America. Others are extremely annoying with their visa requirements, such as America and China, requiring frequent renewals and heavy fines for people who overstay.

The petty bureaucrats often try to examine your visa to find a mistake in order to pounce on you. Hence, do try to maintain a validvisa, or you risk getting sent back to where you came from. I found that out the hard way today. My visa was valid, they just can't read English! Communists. Another day in chiggerland.

It’s a time of inventions
A time of surprises…
A time to be used wisely…
When every penny counts
And nothing matters more than the bottom line
Visa knows what’s important to you—
and that’s why we’ve plunged headlong into the 21st Century.
To bring you the innovations you expect from the #1 credit card in the solar system.

Introducing, the VisaChip®.
Imagine the freedom, the possibilities, and the safety
that comes with knowing that your money is where you mouth is.

With a simple five to seven hour out-patient surgery procedure, specially qualified doctors will insert in your body the greatest financial wonder of all time:
The VisaChip®.

Smaller than the size of a postage stamp, the bio-energized titanium integrated circuit with patented V-Technology, is inserted at the roof of the mouth, where conductors tap into the bountiful power of your body’s saliva, bringing the VisaChip® to life.

It’s so simple, you can now Buy with your Eyes™
where what you see is what you get. Optical-Charged Coupled Devices are braided directly into the ganglion cells in the back of your skull. If you want it, and you have the proper balance, you can take home anything you lay your eyes on.

Never to be stolen, lost or counterfeited, the VisaChip®
goes where you go. Participating stores, know when your coming, what you’ve purchased before, what you’re considering, and whether or not you even have enough money to be standing in their place of business.

When your credit’s riding high, you’ll feel the gentle tingle of success in your mouth, and when it’s not, the sour taste of negative funds will remind you to stay home.

And if by some unfortunate occurrence you are ever kidnapped, GPS tracking and adrenaline receptors inside the VisaChip® will detect your danger, alert the authorities, help coordinate your rescue and make the payoff, for a small fee. All this and more, choreographed directly from your head in conjunction with VisaChip® headquarters and the Federal Reserve.

It’s a brave new world, and Visa once again, is leading the way…
Isn’t it about time for you to put your money, where your mouth is?

In 1914, Western Union issued metal identification plates to its best customers, allowing them to send telegrams now and pay later. Over the next 30 years, gas stations, department stores, railroads, and even AT&T began issuing similar charge plates, or cardboard charge cards, to either preferred customers or, more frequently, any customer who was willing to fill out an application. It was a convenience to customers, who didn't have to carry cash or a checkbook, but it also served to increase customer loyalty, since people were more likely to frequent a store for which they carried a charge card.

Following World War II, the parents of the baby boomers started buying just about everything on credit, and banks started to see an opportunity. Businesses were essentially giving their customers a short-term loan when the customers used a charge card, and banks already had a lot of experience with loans (and knew they could make money off them).

Banks began to sign up both their own customers and local merchants to participate in credit card programs that they would administer. The businesses were charged a small percentage of each amount charged by a customer, but, especially for small businesses, it was cheaper than setting up their own charge account program; meanwhile, bank credit cards were more convenient for customers, who could carry fewer cards and pay fewer bills. Beginning in the mid-1950s, banks began to add the revolving credit option to their credit cards, which allowed customers to carry a balance, albeit with a fairly high interest rate charged.

In 1958, San Francisco-based Bank of America introduced its credit card, BankAmericard. As one of the largest banks in the most highly populated state in the U.S., Bank of America had managed to sign up a whole slew of merchants statewide to accept BankAmericard, and the blue, white, and gold logo became nearly ubiquitous on store doors in California. Bank of America also welcomed applications for the card not just from its accountholders, but from anyone, a move soon copied by other banks.

Bank of America managed to use its might, and the might of the sheer number of BankAmericard holders, to persuade out of state merchants to accept the card, and to convince other banks in other states to issue BankAmericard themselves. (At the time, federal regulations prevented banks from operating across state lines under most circumstances, so Bank of America could only issue BankAmericard in California.) In 1966, Bank of America created a separate division, the BankAmericard Service Corporation, to manage the BankAmericard portion of the business. Four years later, the division was spun off entirely, becoming National BankAmericard Inc., an association of all the BankAmericard-issuing banks.

At around the same time, several of Bank of America's California competitors were forming a competing association, Interbank, and were similarly expanding nationally, eventually becoming Master Charge and then MasterCard.

In the early-to-mid 1970s, BankAmericard innovations included electronic authorization systems (previously, merchants would have to have to make a phone call to authorize large transactions), as well as what was at first called a deposit access card, but later became known as a debit card or a check card.

BankAmericard also began to expand internationally, forming the International Bankcard Company (IBANCO) in 1974. However, many banks were reluctant to issue a credit card with the word "America" in the name. The problem was solved in 1976 when BankAmericard became Visa, a name chosen because it was short and "worked" in just about every language, and because it had the positive connotation of "access" (a visa could give one access to another country, and a Visa card could give one access to things he or she wouldn't be able to buy otherwise). National BankAmericard Inc. became Visa USA, and IBANCO became Visa International.

From then on, things stayed pretty much the same. Visa remained a not-for-profit association of its member banks (14,000 in the United States alone), with Visa USA still headquartered in Bank of America's hometown of San Francisco. Post-1976 events included introducing the preferred card in 1982 (eventually becoming the gold card and the platinum card), introducing the stored valuesmart card in the mid-1990s, periodically updating its electronic transaction systems, and running frequent television commercials in an attempt to distinguish itself from MasterCard (and, to a lesser extent, from American Express, Discover, and other items people have in their wallets).

After the 1976 name change, Bank of America had continued to call its Visa cards "BankAmericard Visa," but, sadly, slowly phased out the name to match the recommended "(name of bank) Visa" style.

Sources:

www.visa.com

"History of Bankcards" at www.cardpay.net

The Bank of America Visa check card (not a BankAmericard) in my wallet